Socrates of the streets

Raised in South Central LA, Walter Mosley dropped out of college and worked in computers. After taking a writing course, he penned a series of best-selling mysteries which drew plaudits from Bill Clinton. But his new book, a critique of the US war on terror, finds little favour among America's current political establishment.

Walter Mosley in his office in the meat packing district of New York. Photograph: Neville Elder/Corbis Sygma

In his dazed reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, Walter Mosley remembered his late father, Leroy. A Louisianan from the Jim Crow south, Leroy had told him he became an American only during the second world war: being shot at by Germans in France brought home to him that he had the same rights, as well as the same duties, as his white compatriots. This led him, in the 1960s, to join the US civil rights movement. As Walter watched the destruction of the twin towers from his Greenwich Village apartment he was shocked to realise that he was among the targets of the attack, and he resolved to "start worrying more about the rights of others - those America has been stepping on and stealing from for so long".

Mosley's 17th book, What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace, to be published on the second anniversary of September 11, draws movingly on personal reminiscence in a critique of the US "war on terror". But, though everyone is invited to read it, the book is addressed to African-Americans. Just as the civil rights movement became a beacon of liberation across the world, Mosley hopes to see African-Americans in the vanguard of a new peace movement.

In his view, though black Americans shared the horror of their white compatriots at what happened on September 11, few felt their surprise. "We know what the rest of the world feels about American rhetoric on democracy because we have been lied to about freedom and carry a similar rage in our hearts." The attacks of 2001 were not the first terrorist acts on US soil, he says, citing the 1921 Tulsa riots in Oklahoma that drove out an entire black business community, or the church bombings of the 1960s. "Lynchings, rape, the prison system are acts of terrorism that have been aimed at keeping us down," he says. "White Americans don't know how to live with people who hate them. We do."

Yet he counsels not violence, but understanding to temper the "rapaciousness of our pillaging corporations". He likens puzzlement at September 11 to that of bystanders at the 1965 Watts race riots in his hometown of Los Angeles, when white Americans "in ignorance of their own history, believed in [their] innocence".

"We're the world's major exporters of terrorism," he says, citing economic sanctions and war against Iraq, Vietnam, Cambodia and Guatemala. "I don't like people dropping planes on my city, so yes, let's declare war on terrorism, but it has to include our own: anybody anywhere who commits a terrorist act is our enemy - whether they're CIA, al-Qaida or Islamic Jihad."

What Next was published in the US in February, during the drive to war with Iraq. While the Los Angeles Times commended Mosley for "boldly advocating his position in a time when dissent can be construed as unpatriotic", neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reviewed the book. This despite Mosley having written "crossover" bestsellers and having arguably the highest profile of any African-American male writer. During an event at Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop in London's Bloomsbury, this summer, Mosley was scathing about media curbs on dissent and what he sees as a stifling atmosphere of continuous alerts. "The US has become a terrorist government," he declared. "It terrorises its citizens so they won't argue."

Mosley, 51, published his first book in 1990, after 15 years as a computer programmer. Devil in a Blue Dress, a mystery set in 1948 in Los Angeles, spawned a 1995 Hollywood film starring Denzel Washington. Mosley has since written six further novels about the reluctant detective Ezekiel "Easy" Porterhouse Rawlins, who does "favours" in those areas of LA where white investigators draw blanks. The series, which is being adapted for US television, spans the years from 1939 to the mid-1960s, and evokes events in US history from which African-Americans are often edited out. For Mosley, they are "emotional histories of the heart and soul of black America". The latest, Six Easy Pieces, published in July, is set after the assassination of John F Kennedy.

His sales tripled when, in 1992, presidential contender Bill Clinton waved his favourite writer's books from the steps of the campaign plane. When Clinton became president, he told the Wall Street Journal it was interesting "for all Americans" to see the "way it was from a black person's view ... in the 40s, 50s and 60s". For Mosley, Clinton's approval means "every journalist in the world knows my name". He is published in 24 countries. Yet he bridles at the persistent "crime writer" tag. Besides his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones mysteries, he has created a ghetto philosopher, Socrates Fortlow, a "blues novel", science fiction and a "non-aligned attack on capitalism", Workin' On the Chain Gang (2000). He also writes for theatre and film.

"You can't tag Walter," says Manthia Diawara, director of the Institute of African-American Affairs at New York University, where Mosley was artist in residence. Like his hero Rawlins "he travels across America, which is rare" from tea at the White House to black nationalist areas of Chicago, where "they only talk to other black people". In Diawara's view, "his ideas seem far-fetched, but they're original and provocative". On National Public Radio in March, Mosley said: "For Bush to say 'terrorists hate freedom' is wrong. Capitalism hates freedom: they don't want people to be free. African-Americans understand that better than anyone else." The drive to maximise profits, he argues, is inimical to the "minimum wage or Medicare, so dictators like Pol Pot, Noriega, Papa Doc are our friends". He professes a leaning towards anarcho-syndicalism, but is pragmatic. "Most people live by capitalism, and I'm one of them. I just want some control over it."

"His questions are better than his solutions," a USA Today reviewer wrote of What Next. But Mosley, a believer in the Socratic method, sees the writer not as an expert but as someone who provokes dialogue. Bill Fletcher, president of the Washington non-profit group TransAfrica Forum, to which Mosley belongs, likens his views to Noam Chomsky's but says, "Walter is writing for the person on the street. He wants people to reconsider the way they look at the world, asking tough questions about the cost of US policies to the individual American." While Mosley accepts that his focus on individual responsibility ("not a liberal concept") might strike a chord with Republicans, his plea is addressed not to politicians but to "plumbers and day labourers". The writer's job, he insists, is to make complex ideas accessible. "I've said these things all my life, but nobody listened because I was a computer programmer."

A large, bashful man with a gap-toothed chuckle, Mosley illustrates abstract ideas with anecdotes and snatches of dialogue in his characters' various lilts, and talks about them as though they live across the street. The British writer and actor Stella Duffy enjoys his laconic humour, and says his slow, musical delivery can disguise his acuity: "He's got an astonishing memory." Two years ago he presided over a 70th-birthday banquet for the US Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. "I'm respected; that makes me happy," he says. "It's wonderful for the people I represent to know you can be happy telling the truth as you see it - which in my parents' era was unheard of."

He was born in 1952 in Watts, Los Angeles. His father was a clerk in the segregated US army, where African-Americans were restricted to service support roles or separate combat units. He returned to join a postwar exodus of black southerners "looking for freedom" in California. There Leroy met a Jewish woman, Ella, at the school where he was a janitor and she a clerk. They tried to marry in 1951 but, though the union was legal in the state, no one would give them a licence. They were married years after Walter, their only child, was born. Ella too was an only child, and Leroy an early orphan. "They were very self-sufficient; they ignored racism unless it was a direct threat."

Ella's family of east European Jews ("communist revolutionaries from Russia") had moved west from New York. Although Mosley saw his mother as white in 1950s America, he sees Jews as the "Negroes of Europe". Racial classifications are "finally just cultural attitudes": his mother would not have been "white" in 1930s Germany. In Mosley's novel A Red Death (1991), set during the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1950s, Rawlins finds more affinity with the Polish-Jewish communist he spies on than the anti-semitic FBI agent who signs him up. When the agent tells him the reds want to enslave the world, and "don't believe in freedom like Americans do", Rawlins notes with irony, "a white man lecturing me about slavery".

Mosley feels his parents shielded him from racism. Yet, impatient with a Tiger Woods-type "biraciality", he says: "I was black in America. It was important to know how to survive." For $9.50 a week, he attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to "more comfortably affluent, working-class" west LA. "It allowed me to have higher aspirations for myself." His high school was "just like me: half-black, half-Jewish". He was 13, and acting in a play with a multiracial troupe in what he calls the oldest black bookstore in America, the Aquarian, when the Watts uprising broke out in 1965. His father thought it futile that people burned down their own stores. But Mosley, whose forthcoming Easy Rawlins mystery, Little Scarlett , is set in the aftermath of the Watts riots, sees them as an "awakening: the rioters were heroic - they changed America".

Leroy, who rose from janitor to head custodian - as far as the racial ceiling of the 1950s would allow - wanted his son to work for the prison service and advised him to "pay the rent and do what you love to do". Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates, asking questions then spoiling ready-made replies". His mother had "emotional cutoffs; she wasn't effusive, but she afforded me the tools to write", filling his world with European classics from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He also loves Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez.

He never joined a political group ("that was way too serious when I was having a good time"). In a "long-haired, hippie" phase, he drifted around Santa Cruz and Europe before being "thrown out" of one liberal arts college in Vermont and doing a political science degree at another. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory he started work in computers, which he found tedious. Moving to New York in 1981, he met the dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. They separated 10 years later and were divorced in 2001. While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem. One of his tutors was Edna O'Brien, who recalls him as an avid learner and exceptionally knowledgeable. "He became a shepherd, mediating between me and the other students." She encouraged him, saying, "you're black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches therein".

Mosley set out to write a sequence of novels "not unlike Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, about the people who migrated from the deep south to LA". He drew his characters from the pool halls, jazz clubs and barbershops of these transplanted communities. In Gone Fishin', a coming-of-age novel set in 1939 in the Texas-Louisiana bayou, a 19-year-old Rawlins seals a bond with the volatile killer Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Yet no publisher would buy the novel. In Mosley's view, it was "PTM: pre-Terry McMillan", before the bestselling author of Disappearing Acts (1990) and Waiting to Exhale (1992) transformed publishers' preconceptions. Gone Fishin', he says, was about "young black men in the deep south. But they said, 'white people don't read about black people, black women don't like black men, and black men don't read. So who the hell is going to read this book?'" Though he credits Alice Walker's The Color Purple as his biggest single influence, and loves the work of Toni Morrison and other women, he felt literature by and for black men was overlooked in the 1980s by a "white feminist machine prepared to idolise and come to grips with black women and their struggles - a lot of which were with black men".

Inspired by the 1949 film of Graham Greene's The Third Man, Mosley wrote Devil in a Blue Dress. "It turned out to be a mystery," he says. "One publisher said, 'You know, there already is a black detective'." But one of his tutors showed it to an agent, who sold it to the publisher WW Norton. Easy Rawlins is a war veteran with his own house and lawn, who reads Plato and WEB DuBois, dabbles in property, gets a steady job as a custodian and adopts children. The novels are narrated by Rawlins in his 60s, looking "back then", to a time when black corpses scarcely made the news. The series unfolded with A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), and Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), Mosley's "homage" to Malcolm X.

Although he admits to being influenced by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Mosley contrasts his detective with Chandler's "blue-collar existentialist genre: Easy has kids and middle-class yearnings; he's connected to his community. His existentialism is tempered by necessity - though, as time has gone on, more detectives have taken on that mantle."

Mosley's heroes survive, with deep flaws, in a morally ambiguous world of weighted odds as the novels question the meaning of goodness, justice and criminality for people to whom the American dream is out of reach. "It's the easiest thing for a crime novel to be political because you talk about the everyday life of people - how money impacts, how law works," he says. He set out to create black male heroes "because my father was my hero". Rawlins's hardboiled sidekick, Mouse, is a sharp dresser who could "gut a man and then sit down to a plate of spaghetti". While Mosley sees Mouse as a sociopath, a flawed but familiar rogue, his fearless characters (including Fearless Jones) are also escapist fantasies in a world where men are always tensing for violence. Mouse, says Mosley, is a hero to a "generation of black men who are afraid of everyone; he's fearless so there are no limits to his freedom".

According to Diawara, Mosley's fiction has been "crucial to making the black male image acceptable again". In the 1980s, he says, "literature by black men had disappeared and the mainstream image of the black male was pathological - with crack cocaine and rap music or The Cosby Show: the only black father figures were comedians. Walter created a completely new image as part of American modernity." The British writer Mike Phillips, however, has found fault with the series for "playing up to set notions of black American psychology", in that Mouse "offers up a mono-tone identity, the characteristic rage of black men", which "fits an image of blackness that's been peddled by white writers - though Walt does it with more authenticity".

Phillips also felt the blues-and-jazz milieu accorded with a "romantic notion of black culture that white readers feel comfortable with". Yet for Mosley, Rawlins is "talking about black people but to everyone". The laws of LA in the 1940s-60s, he says, were "no different than now, but today, people still make the same assumptions about Easy. He tells these stories from a time approaching now; they're modern novels in a social sense." Others have objected to Mosley's portrayal of women. "Easy Rawlins looks at women and sees their breasts," says Duffy. "But it wouldn't be right for the characters to be affected by a second-wave feminism that hadn't started yet."

In his "blues novel", RL's Dream (1995), Soupspoon Wise, an old Mississippi Delta bluesman dying of cancer in New York, is befriended by a young, white southern woman fleeing sexual abuse by her father. Mosley started the novel when his father was diagnosed with cancer and finished it after he died on New Year's day 1993. Soupspoon has a remission, winning a reprieve that allows him, says Mosley, to "recapture who he was" in a way Leroy was unable to do. His father, Mosley reflects, "put limits on my life that are only recently opening up. He wanted me to be all the things he couldn't be and was angry when I didn't understand the torture he went through." Duffy sees responsibility and fatherhood as keynotes throughout his work.

Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates. "There are about a dozen black writers whose work sells really big. We're making millions for white publishers, and I thought it was time to give something back," Mosley said. For Coates, who also published What Next in the US, the gesture was a crucial precedent followed by writers such as Gloria Naylor and Derek Bell. "Money's not Walter's highest ideal," he says, adding that big publishers ignored black readers until the mid-1990s, when they emerged as a buoyant spot in a plunging book market. According to Coates, the growth rate of sales to African-Americans exceeds 18% in a market that has dropped 5% overall. But despite growing power as consumers, very few are employed by publishers. Long critical of "liberal racism" in the industry, Mosley founded a publishing training institute at Harlem's City College. In Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems (1998), a collection of essays he co-edited, based on a forum at New York University that included Spike Lee and Angela Davis, he underlined what he saw as the obligation of the successful to give a hand to those left behind.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and its sequel, Walkin' the Dog (1999), are modern-day parables, partly set during the LA riots of 1992, which followed the acquittal of the policemen videotaped beating Rodney King. Socrates Fortlow, a homeless LA ex-con who has served 27 years for a double murder and rape he "definitely did commit", cannot vote or get a decent job, but is more preoccupied with redemption. "All he has is his powerful mind," says Mosley. "Prison teaches you a lot; there's racism, but what matters to him is being a good man in his world."

Mosley wrote the screenplay for the British director Michael Apted's 1998 feature film of the Socrates stories, Always Outnumbered, made for HBO television and starring Laurence Fishburne. Apted admires a "magical quality strongly rooted in naturalism and realism" in Mosley's work, and his "ability to raise the mundane to a philosophical level: Socrates is a legendary, larger-than-life character, but grounded and accessible".

Mosley once suspected he became a writer because, as an only child, there was "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies ... I'm very much in my mind, creating and putting things together", and "committed to improving things, to making things right".

He makes about six trips a year to LA, where his mother, now 83, still works for the board of education. Of his divorce he says: "It was good for me to free myself. I go out with somebody but I'm not thinking of a relationship defining my life. My work takes up a great deal of who and what I am, and I'm very happy being with me." Nor does he see himself as cut out for fatherhood. "Kids like me and I like kids, but the attention children crave and need, I put elsewhere. I'd resent it." People are surprised he writes so well about children, "but I think that's because I'm childish myself". He says he has about 30,000 superhero comics, does pottery and, partly inspired by Kandinsky and Klee, draws hundreds of small watercolours on broadly lined paper, which he calls "alien script". He binds them into limited-edition "Christmas books" for friends: "I've drawn pictures since I was 12, and still love TV. I do many of the same things I did as a kid."

He is also an avid reader of science fiction. In his sci-fi novel Blue Light (1998), set in hippie San Francisco in the 1960s, Chance, an "unhappy mulatto child" raised by his white mother in a white neighbourhood, is arrested on his lawn for riding his bicycle. Chance, says Mosley, "is not me, though I understand him". The novel puzzled some reviewers with its probing of the nature of the soul, but Mosley felt that by writing it he was finally free to stick to mysteries. Another sci-fi book, Futureland (2001), is about a "war of crimes against humanity that nobody wins".

What Next challenges both what Mosley sees as a conditioned silence on the part of black Americans ("it's hard for us to see ourselves in a position of power, even though we are"), and an enforced reticence. Bill Fletcher of TransAfrica, whose influential members include Mosley's friends Harry Belafonte and actor Danny Glover, says that while African-American attempts to shape foreign policy date from the 1800s, through Marcus Garvey, WEB DuBois and Paul Robeson, they have always met resistance: "We're regularly told we should restrict ourselves to talking about race," Fletcher says. Mosley, who once said the establishment has decided that black writers are best suited to address their chains, resists such limits. In insisting that black Americans consider themselves accountable for what their government does abroad, he invokes an "African America" that might be said to have fragmented along class lines since the pre-civil rights era in which his mysteries are set. "America is still one of the most racist countries in the world," he insists. "African-Americans have a tragic history that unites and identifies us and allows us to understand the world differently ... We're the wealthiest and most powerful group of black people in the world but we're not taking a stand, and we should be; it's our responsibility."

As for African-Americans already directing US foreign policy, Mosley is dismissive. George W Bush, "more than any president since Abraham Lincoln, has given power to African-Americans because he's looking for co-conspirators"; Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice no more represent African America than does the conservative supreme court judge Clarence Thomas. Mosley supports Belafonte's recent attack on Powell, seeing it as hyperbole that at least made the news. "House Negro" may be an archaic term, says Mosley, "but Harry used it to say that he's in the man's White House, not helping us out in the fields. People need to hear that most of us aren't in agreement." Mosley welcomes the White House appointees simply on the grounds that "once the door is open, you can't close it again".

He has settled into a prolific rhythm of writing two books a year, one a mystery. Fear Itself, to be published here next month, is a sequel to Fearless Jones (2001), set in 1950s LA. While for the author the Rawlins series is steeped in existential brooding and verges on tragedy, the Fearless books draw on a lighter, comic side of himself. He is writing a new series set in present-day New York, with the detective Archibald Lawless, "anarchist at large". He has also completed an "existentialist literary novel", The Man in My Basement, edited Best American Short Stories - out in the US in October - and is working on The Principles of Unity, which advocates a third US political party. Since he started at 34, Mosley has written every day. "I've found something I love to do," he says. "I feel as if I've managed to be who I am, and be respected for it. It's kind of wonderful."

Walter Mosley

Born: January 12 1952, Watts, Los Angeles.

Educated: Johnson State College, Vermont (BA political science); University of Massachusetts at Amherst.